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Important Changes

A lot of hard work was put into this release by Brandon Aaron and David Serduke. David is a new addition to the jQuery core development team and has been making significant contributions – please help us in welcoming him!

Primarily, this has been a bug fix and optimization release. We landed over 120 bug fixes and our test suite now has over 1157 tests in it – which we are quite proud of.

300% Speed Improvements to $(DOMElement)

Once again, we’ve taken a step at micro-improving the most-used features in jQuery. Specifically, the use of passing a DOM element into the jQuery function. (Most frequently used when you see stuff like $(this) in your code.)

Here’s a quick peek at some of the speed jumps that you can expect in all the major browsers:

Browser

1.2.1 (ms)

1.2.2 (ms)

Firefox 2

0.041

0.015

Firefox 3

0.033

0.01

Safari 3

0.017

0.005

Opera 9

0.023

0.004

Internet Explorer 6

0.04

0.03

.ready() Overhaul

The document ready function has been long due for some extra love. We’ve made a number of specific changes.

Internet Explorer document ready drastically improved. We use a new technique inspired by Diego Perini. It allows us to not have to do a document.write() anymore, which is really fantastic.

All browsers now wait for CSS to be ready, in addition to just the DOM. In reality, it’s not just a vanilla document ready anymore – but we found that users, overwhelmingly, needed to wait for document styling to be active (such as knowing if an element is visible, or what its height is). Specifically we’ve added improvements to Safari and Opera to make this possible.

$(document).bind("ready", fn); – You can now watch for the document ready event via the traditional .bind() function. Of course, .ready() still works as you would expect it to.

.bind(“mouseenter”) / .bind(“mouseleave”)

The functionality that was the core of the .hover() function has been split out into two new cross-browser events: mouseenter and mouseleave. These are different from mouseover and mouseout as those events will fire as you move in and out of child elements (which is generally not desired). For example, the following are both valid and work perfectly in jQuery 1.2.2:

.bind(“mousewheel”)

We have [http://dev.jquery.com/browser/trunk/plugins/mousewheel/jquery.mousewheel.js a new plugin], written by Brandon Aaron, based on the new Event API which adds mousewheel event support to jQuery core. This will allow you to write things like:

Complex :not()

Even though it's not part of the CSS 3 specification it's been a common feature request - so you can now do complex expressions in your :not() selectors. For example, the following now work:

$(".hover:not(li.active)")

$("li:not(.active,.hover,:contains(test))")

Accept Headers

For normal jQuery Ajax operations we now send an extra Accept header to let the server know what kind of content we're looking for. If you specify a dataType argument then we'll take care of all the header setting for you. We currently send the following headers for each dataType.

xml "application/xml, text/xml"

html "text/html"

script "text/javascript, application/javascript"

json "application/json, text/javascript"

text "text/plain"

Everything else: "*/*"

Bug Fixes

Here's a sampling of some of the functionality that's seen some important overhauling.

.clone() overhaul

Script evaluation overhaul

height() / width() overhaul

Cross-frame DOM manipulation

A few memory leaks have been resolved

Event API

There's a new API for dealing with events. You can now create your own custom event types (with custom ways of being set up and torn down). Effectively, it allows you to go beyond simple event triggering and create a full scheme for attaching, handling, and tearing down events on an element. A [http://dev.jquery.com/browser/trunk/plugins/mousewheel/jquery.mousewheel.js demonstration plugin] was created by Brandon Aaron that you can use to learn the powerful new API.